A line from legendary singer/songwriter John Prine’s song “Spanish Pipedream” is making more and more sense as each year passes:

“Blow up your TV, Throw away your paper, Go to the country, Build you a home, Plant a little garden, Eat a lot of peaches, Try an’ find Jesus on your own.”

It’s not a bad recommendation.

In April of 2020, many things being propagated about COVID-19 weren’t making sense, and many of us out here in the Dakotas were collectively saying, “Just wait a minute…”

By the time the 2020 “Summer of Rage” concluded — with the record damage and destruction from arson, vandalism, and looting in response to the death of George Floyd — we here in the Dakotas were certainly glad to be far from all that urban and suburban thuggery.

What did make sense was what people in the Dakotas do naturally, which is “use common sense.” Commonsense things like:

• Don’t get your hands and loose clothing caught in augers or power takeoffs on tractors.
• If you are sick, stay home.
• If you are angry about some real or imaginary injustice, don’t burn down buildings and loot businesses run by hardworking, honest citizens.

Things remained normal here for the most part. The only “protest” by BLM or Antifa in my home town included two purple-haired teenagers clad in black standing on a street corner. No one paid attention to them, and after an hour, they packed up their protest signs and left.

When COVID did reach the Dakotas, we simply exercised common sense. We washed our hands and stayed home if sick. Being two of the seven states that were NOT locked down by overbearing government decrees, we went to work each day as normal.

This infuriated the mainstream media talkingheads, with South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem being one of their prime targets for her position of freedom first and trusting South Dakota residents to use common sense. The narrative of certain death if you didn’t follow health department “guidelines” was being challenged, and they did not like it.

So the numbers were manipulated to make things seem worse than they actually were. Most of the “COVID deaths” in the Dakotas were in nursing homes, even when comorbidity factors were the underlying cause. One physician confessed to me that he was required to list COVID as a cause of death in an elderly nursing home patient with stage 4 liver cancer. He said COVID or not, his patient would have been dead in a few days anyway.

This practice of inflating COVID death numbers by these means was widespread.

The vast majority of us here turned off the daily televised COVID briefings early on and went about our lives. I attended an Easter luncheon in 2020 with 40 people in one house; not a mask was present, nor was “social distancing” being practiced. Three weeks later, not a single person in that gathering was sick, and no grandparents or other contacts not present were infected by “non-symptomatic” carriers, as the media and their “experts” assured us would happen.

The media would have predicted a massive body count from our little gathering, and in certain states we would have been raided by the SWAT team.

On the way home from that gathering, I passed a young girl in a Prius by herself. She had all the windows rolled up and had on a mask and a face shield, no doubt rushing home to the TV to get the latest grim outlook for her young life.

Where the Dakotas won was in the mental health index. People here were not isolated or afraid, except maybe that girl in the Prius…

I’m not minimizing the fact that for some, COVID was a deadly virus. But neither should we minimize or ignore the egregious exaggerations of the media in regard to it, supporting all those disproportionate government mandates — one of the biggest surges of government tyranny in my lifetime.

The spring and summer of 2020 were saturated with unprecedented mainstream media propaganda centered on COVID and the death of Floyd. On one side, they incessantly pushed control and fear with COVID while hypocritically ignoring the lack of “social distancing” present in the mobs and the rampant lawlessness of BLM and Antifa as they burned the country down.

What will the media tell everyone to believe in this political cycle?

Will all the programming constantly telling us one political candidate is bad while another one is good, will there be some new “deadly virus” they can gleefully warn us about, while failing to mention it’s no more deadly than the common flu to the vast majority of the population?

Don Henley got it right decades ago with regard to the “news” with the song “Dirty Laundry”:

“We got the bubble headed bleach blond who comes on at five — she can tell you about the plane crash with a gleam in her eye. It’s interesting when people die. Give us dirty laundry.”

How much of what the media is currently saying about many subjects makes sense when compared to actual facts?

Frankly, I turned the mainstream media off 15 years ago. I’m not uninformed, I just get my facts from sources that actually report facts. More pointedly and rhetorically, when will people stop believing everything the mass media tells them to believe? Or did George Orwell have it right?